Bill Maher sat across from ABC's Jonathan Karl on Sunday's episode of This Week and said five words that probably sent HBO's PR department scrambling for the Tums: "My vote is in play."
The liberal comedian who once donated a million dollars to Barack Obama just told national television he's open to voting for Vice President JD Vance in 2028.
Karl asked the question directly — could Maher see himself voting for Vance? Maher didn't hedge. "Yes. If this is the, the Democratic side, yes," he said. Then he dropped the line that matters: "I'm not living in communist America."
That's not a throwaway quip from a guy who built a career on throwaway quips. Maher — fresh off winning the Mark Twain Prize for Comedy — has been tracking what the Democratic Socialists of America actually publish in their own platform documents, and he doesn't like what he found. "I've read the quotes from the DSA platform, from their own mouths," he told Karl. "Don't tell me I'm not seeing what I am seeing."
What he's seeing is a platform that calls for eliminating the United States Senate. Replacing the presidency with a Congress-chosen executive. Subordinating the Supreme Court to Congress. Granting universal amnesty to illegal aliens. Defunding the Department of Defense. Closing overseas military bases. And abolishing police and prisons — which the DSA delicately refers to as "carceral forces."
That's not a fringe pamphlet from a college anarchist club. That's the stated platform of an organization whose members hold several seats in Congress and other elected positions.
Maher's broader indictment of his own party wasn't limited to policy papers. "Democrats are cowardly," he said flatly. He pointed to the party's tolerance of campus intifada rallies and added, "When we're cheering for the Intifada, God, I'm out." He ticked through the issues — men in women's sports, defunding police, abolishing prisons — and landed on a verdict that sounded less like a comedy monologue and more like an exit interview: "There's just a level of nutty that I'm so glad that whenever it was, I was like, no, I'm not going along."
Maher interviewed Vance on Real Time just last month, in June. Whatever he saw apparently didn't scare him off. His appearance on This Week was his first Sunday morning roundtable spot since the Obama presidency. He didn't wander onto ABC to talk about his Netflix special. He came with a specific message: the Democratic Party has been captured by people who want to restructure the entire American government, and the rest of the party is too cowardly to say so.
